Design Studios
4 million players designed alone.Belonging had to feel like a warm room.
A 30,000-person Facebook group proved players didn't want to design alone — they wanted to celebrate each other's work. Research, frameworks, and a 19-screen prototype for a social feature that had to feel like home, not a competitive ladder — built in three weeks.
Context & Challenge
Venue is a mobile interior design game with over 4 million downloads and a player base that's roughly 90% women, 25 and older. The core loop is satisfying: design a room, submit it for anonymous peer voting, wait two hours, get a star rating.
But every emotional peak in that loop happens alone. The pride after submitting something you're proud of. The anxiety during the two-hour wait. The validation — or sting — of the score. Nobody sees any of it.
Then there's the Facebook group. 30,000 players built it themselves. They weren't asking for chat features. They were sharing designs, celebrating each other's rooms, and doing what the app never gave them space for: belonging to something bigger than a star rating.
Emily, the founder, had a clear north star: D30 retention through social attachment. Not engagement tricks. Not notifications that guilt you into opening the app. The kind of attachment where a player still wants to open Venue in a month because she feels part of something warm.
The Design Challenge
Build a group social feature for a game whose brand is calm, elegant, no pressure — without turning it into a competitive guild. No chat. No streaks. No "last active" timestamps. No leaderboards. Understandable in 10 seconds. Woven into the existing game loop.
30,000 players built a community the app never gave them space for.
MyRole&Approach
This was a three-week design sprint coordinated by Yummy Labs in partnership with Superbloom and their founder, Emily. I owned the full design arc — research through prototype — working from a shared brief while making every framework, screen, and pixel decision independently — with Claude and his codes as my copilot.
Phase 1
Understand
Game audit, player psychology, alignment
Phase 2
Frame
JTBD stories, KPI mapping, constraints
Phase 3
Explore
6 wireframes, reference analysis, hybrid
Phase 4
Build
36 components, 19 screens, prototype
Phase 5
Present
Narrative, walkthrough, phased roadmap
TheWork
Discovery
The first thing I did was play the game. Not to evaluate it — to feel what players feel. I mapped every point-earning activity, every existing social surface, and every natural gathering moment in the app.
The pattern was clear: the moments with the highest emotional charge had zero social presence. A player finishes a design she's proud of and has nowhere to put that pride. She earns five stars and nobody knows. She waits two hours for results and sits in that anxiety alone.
From there I built Beth — not a persona with a stock photo and a job title, but a psychological needs profile grounded in Self-Determination Theory. Three needs (autonomy, relatedness, competence), ten facets, mapped against real player reviews and the 30K Facebook group as behavioral evidence.
The key insight: Beth doesn't leave because of one bad experience. She leaves because a dozen small unmet needs — no one to share a 5-star moment with, no sense that her voting matters to anyone, no progress that connects her to other people — compound into "I just don't feel like opening it today." That quiet erosion is what Design Studios had to prevent.
Activity Audit
Beth's Psych Profile
Moments Mapping
JTBD Mapping
KPI Mapping
Wordless Connections
Integration Mapping
Discovery Flow
Beth doesn't leave because of one bad experience.
A dozen small unmet needs compound into ' I don't feel like opening it today .'
Framework & Strategy
Twelve job stories emerged from Beth's profile, organized across four phases of the player journey: Joining, Staying, Contributing, and Leaving. Three guardrail rules crystallized across all of them — and became hard constraints, not aspirations.
Guardrail Rules
Contribution = Participation
A 3-star design and a 5-star design count equally toward the group goal. Voting counts. Submitting counts. Just being there counts.
Presence, Not Pressure
You can feel your Studio around you — but it never pings you, never guilt-trips you, never tells you how many days you've been gone.
Weekly Reset, No Debt
Every Sunday it starts fresh. Miss a week, come back to a clean slate. Not a disappointed team.
Churn Patterns
Comparison-driven leave
When contribution visibility becomes an implicit leaderboard.
↳ Anonymous gallery, private coral dot, no individual counts.
Homework-erosion leave
When the feature starts feeling like obligation.
↳ No streaks, no absence penalties, weekly reset.
Staleness leave
When the weekly cycle goes flat and there's nothing new.
↳ Progressive postcards, phased roadmap, Studio Seasons on the horizon.
Exploration
None of the individual directions solved all three design tensions alone. The point was never to pick one — it was to find what worked across all of them. Three directions for the Studio Home. Three for weekly goal progress. Each tested a different balance of warmth, visibility, and momentum. The Hybrid cherry-picked the best of each: skyline as emotional anchor in the postcard, a single stat line that only goes up, progress ripple with milestone notches but no percentage, anonymous gallery with a private coral dot only Beth can see, and progressive postcards that fill from grayscale to color. Every week gets one. "A Cozy Week" — not "Incomplete."
Key Design Decisions
Contribution visibility vs. comparison trap
Anonymous gallery. Only Beth sees her own work — a small coral dot, private to her.
Option A — Named gallery with scores
Each design shows the creator's name and star rating. Transparent but risks turning the gallery into a ranking.
Option B ✓ — Anonymous gallery with private indicator
All designs shown anonymously. Only Beth sees which one is hers — a small coral dot, private to her. No names, no scores, no rankings.
The call: Anonymity and the private indicator mitigate the comparison instinct. The gallery celebrates the collective — not individuals.
Weekly momentum vs. mid-week anxiety
Three layers: skyline filling, stat line that only goes up, ripple bar with notches. No percentage label.
Option A — Single progress indicator
One bar or number showing weekly progress. Clear but fragile — mid-week dips feel like failure.
Option B ✓ — Three-layer momentum defense
Skyline filling visually, collective stat that only goes up, ripple bar with milestone notches. Progress as a feeling, not a math problem.
The call: No percentage label — you see progress as a feeling, not a math problem.
Warmth of return vs. guilt of absence
No timestamps. No auto-kick. "Your studio missed you" — not "You missed 3 contributions."
Option A — Light guilt mechanics
'Last active' timestamps, gentle streak counters, 'your team needs you' nudges. Industry standard. Effective short-term.
Option B ✓ — Zero guilt, persistent home
No timestamps. No auto-kick. No absence penalties. The Studio is a persistent home, not a contract. Clean weekly slate on return.
The call: What we deliberately didn't build matters as much as what we did.
Final Designs
Outcome&Impact
19 screens
Full feature flow from discovery through weekly lifecycle
36 components
Variable-bound, auto-layout Figma component system
Live prototype
19-screen tappable prototype with Supabase data collection
SDT × JTBD × Octalysis
Psychology-grounded framework connecting player needs to business KPIs
Design sprint deliverable — not a shipped product. Outcomes are strategic. Phase 1 scoped to the smallest version that proves the hypothesis. Connections, player-created Studios, and Seasons are on the roadmap — but only if Phase 1 earns them.
The hardest design decisions weren't about what to build — they were about what to deliberately leave out.
Every streak counter, every "last active" timestamp, every leaderboard we said no to was a choice to trust that warmth could do what pressure usually does.
— Reflection